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1. Titanfall was very good. Considering it was made primarily by former Infinity Ward members, it very easily could’ve just been Call of Duty multiplayer but with giant robots. But it managed to be more than that. Respawn thought carefully about the game’s balance. They had to. The giant robots couldn’t just be an instant win. Counterintuitively, if the game was to be about how amazing these big robots were, there needed to be advantages to not being in a robot. The obvious way to deal with this was level design: doorways and building interiors that a titan can’t fit into. Each Titanfall map had a mixture of wide roads and open areas for the Titans and twisting corridors and rooftops for the nimble Pilots. Make it so the player has to leave the titan sometimes. Easy.

The less obvious approach: make not being in a titan feel really good. If the titans are giant, clunky, invincible machines, then the pilots have to be the opposite of that. This isn’t just the default Call of Duty first-person controller. You can auto-dash, wall-run, slide, double-jump. The repertoire of your character opens up Titanfall’s maps in exciting ways. When you are clomping around in your titan, pilots could be anywhere around you while you are stuck in your little area. Titanfall didn’t just make the robots feel good. It ensured the robots and the humans felt polemically different, each contrasting and accentuating the strengths of the other. Continue reading →

I’ve played some really fascinating games lately and have wanted to write about them, but have not had the time to do so.Instead of a post on each game (which each truly deserves), here are some quick and messy thoughts I’ve been having about three games. Continue reading →

1. No Man’s Sky is a small videogame made by a tiny, indie studio that, like most small indie videogames, is clearly trying to achieve a very specific experience for a very specific audience. No Man’s Sky is a massive, triple-a videogame being released by Sony on a disc for a full sixty bucks that, like all triple-a games, has to please everyone who plays triple-a videogames. Both these statements are true, which, if nothing else, mostly highlights how categories like ‘indie’ are constructed more from a perceived sense of performed ‘indie-ness’ rather than any quantifiable factors. How you perceive No Man’s Sky is intricately tied up in whether you think it succeeds at being that particular thing for a particular audience, or whether you think it fails to be the next big triple-a open-world game for all gamers that it was set up to be (in part by marketing and in part by those gamers). Continue reading →

My Studio 2 students have now finished their first game for the trimester. They had two weeks to make a short game about an experience that is personal to them. On the whole, I am really happy with how they turned out. Small things here and there could have been improved, but considering the timeline they were working on, they all went pretty good. Most importantly, I am excited by the sheer variety of directions they took the brief, with some creating very mechanics-focused sort of procedural rhetoric games and others making very experiential little vignette works.

While some initially overscoped their project (as everyone does), they all admirably worked out what was actually required for the experience they wanted to communicate to the player, and managed to really sharpen that core nugget. I’m really quite happy with how they went with the exercise.

I spent the last week pestering them all to put their games on itch.io so that I could share their games more broadly. If they’re going to have a game critic for a teacher, they might as well exploit that and actually get some exposure for their games. I was perhaps too optimistic to assume they would all create perfectly crafted itch.io pages for their game with builds for multiple platforms and gifs and all sorts of pretty things. Several of them also uploaded their games as zips; some even uploaded it as a .7z or a .rar at first, before I told them to re-upload it. All sorts of little issues that I hadn’t thought to consciously address but which create all these hurdles that might prevent a player bothering to check out your free little weird game This general self-promotion area is somewhere we could use more work.

But the games themselves turned out pretty well! So here is a little bit about all eight of the games: Continue reading →

On Wednesday my students pitched their ideas for short games based on their personal experience. It was a really chill pitch session where we just sat in a circle and talked through our ideas. I’m pretty excited about the different ideas. All of them seem relatively well scoped and doable, and there are some legitimately interesting ideas in there. Hopefully the games match the ideas!

Before next week’s class, the students have been asked to analyse one of the games about a personal experience that was provided to them and to think about what it is about, how it is about that, and what they can learn from it for their own game.

One of the games on the list is Andi McClure’s He Never Showed Up, made for a dating sim game jam. Despite following Andi’s work for years, this is one of the few games on the list I’d never played before (a previous lecturer of Studio 2, Christy Dena, added it). It’s a simple and powerful short game about being stood up on a date. The player has a hammer and can smash apart the screens reality, knocking down buildings and the stars themselves if they want. Eventually, the player finds the elusive boy and smashes him, too—only to find out it was all a fantasy: the world was not smashed, the boy never showed up, and you were still stood up. Continue reading →

This trimester I am teaching a studio class at SAE Brisbane. My students have to design games that focus on meaning, expression, and emotion. Up to this point in their degree they’ve been focusing on the bits and pieces that make up a videogame. Now, at this point, I’m to try to get them to think about just what they can do with that toolkit. My interpretation of this is to show them a whole bunch of weird shit and to encourage them to make equally weird shit.

My students need to keep a blog throughout the trimester, keeping track of what they are making and why and how. In sympathy with my students and in an attempt to pressure/shame them into actually writing these blogs, I thought I should write about the course as well.

I’m increasingly convinced that students should be playing and making the sort of stuff you would see on itch.io moreso than the stuff you would see on Steam. There’s several reasons for this. First of all, the sort of weird experimental games on itch.io are not necessarily ‘better’, but they are often doing more interesting things from a purely design perspective. ‘More interesting’ in the sense that most students have already played a first-person shooter and a moba and a platforming game and playing new first-person shooters/mobas/platforming games is only going to teach them so much. Whereas the sort of experimental stuff on itch.io is constantly pushing the boundaries of how videogames can say things. Continue reading →

Back in January I wrote a post about how I would like to try running a public game event. A couple of weeks ago, thanks to SK Games and a whole heap of people, I was able to actually do this with the inaugural Trees Go Ping. It went really well! A bunch of people rocked up on a weeknight and people seemed to really enjoy the games and the atmosphere. It is definitely something I would like to do again. This post serves as both a reflection of how it went, and where I want to take Trees Go Ping in the future. Continue reading →